Quantification of the Voicescape: A Person-centric Approach to Describing Real-life Behaviour Patterns - A Case Study Comparing Two Age Groups

Abstract

The human voice is a fundamental part of the everyday auditory environment. A measure of all voice activity that a person produces or perceives in the environment, i.e., the person’s voicescape, might provide an informative, low cost, ecologically valid, and person-centric approach to characterizing patterns of socially-relevant behaviour in real life. In this paper, we use the measure ratio of voice activity (rva) and present results of data acquired from N=20 subjects of 2 different age groups as they engaged in their usual daily life activities over 4 consecutive days. The data show no differences in total voice activity but significant between-group differences in its daily distribution. We propose that measurement of the voicescape can, even without knowledge of specific voice sources, serve as a useful indicator of person- or group specific activity patterns for purposes of describing significant aspects of variation and within- and between-group differences in patterns of everyday behaviour and, potentially, for identifying change in patterns that have health-related implications. Future work will target automatic detection and identification of voice sources and the use of privacy-preserving processing methods.